Nicole Sacco, a senior sociology major, has won the North Carolina Sociological Association's top award for undergraduate research at a four-year college. Details...
The Himes Award is presented annually to the student at a North Carolina four-year college or university who produces the best undergraduate research paper. Sacco’s research is titled “Pharmacists’ Attitudes Toward the Availability of the Emergency Contraceptive Pill,” which she completed this past fall in senior seminar under the instruction of Angela Lewellyn Jones, associate professor of social justice.
Sacco is the second consecutive Elon student to win the Himes Award, which is named after Joseph Himes, who served as founding president of the NCSA from 1969 to 1971. Elon senior Yuliya Dudaronak earned the award in 2006.
The following is the abstract from Sacco’s paper:
“Drastic changes have occurred in the past year regarding the availability of emergency contraception, specifically the emergency contraceptive pill, with out a prescription. This paper examines the attitudes of pharmacists toward the availability of emergency contraception and seeks to understand relationships between religiosity, gender, and age and the pharmacist’s stance on the subject. The data was obtained using 20 surveys from a town in the southern part of the United States. The findings suggest that while there are relationships between religiosity and attitudes toward emergency contraception, there are little correlations between gender, age, and acceptability. Overall, the more religious one considers him/herself to be, the more negatively they will view the use and dissemination of emergency contraception.”